Grace: Her Lives - Her Loves (42 page)

20

BIOLOGICAL EQUATION

R
ainier and Grace spent much of their honeymoon cruising round the island of Corsica, taking full advantage of their yacht to explore deserted coves and beaches, where they could be on their own. It was the tonic they needed after the pressures of their wedding week. Grace was not a good sailor, and the ancient, polished-wood motor yacht was an ungainly conveyance when the sea got rough. Grace was sick for much of the time—but perhaps it was not entirely the boat’s fault. When she got back to Monaco at the end of May, the doctors confirmed her suspicions. “We’re preggos!” she wrote in delight to Judy Kanter, Maree Frisby, and to every other girlfriend whose address she could muster.

Grace had fulfilled the first, and, in some ways, the most important, of her new duties with exemplary speed. It was a crude and basic business, but getting pregnant was the bottom line.

“It gives great joy to the princess and myself,” Rainier announced on August 2, “to share this new happiness with you. . . . In light of this news, so important for me and for yourselves . . . . I ask you to trust in the choice I have made for Monaco’s future, and, also, to remember that the Principality has endured, and will only endure, as long as its Sovereign Prince has full and complete exercise of his power.”

Being the other half of the biological equation carried its own responsibilities. Rainier’s political twist to his family announcement was prompted by the ongoing difficulties he was encountering with his elected National Council and with its leading troublemaker, Tiny’s lover, Jean-Charles Rey, with whom Rainier had recently quarreled. The two men were not to speak to each other for nearly six years. “I see him on the golf course,” Rey told Colin Cross, a reporter for London’s
Daily Express.
“We look at each other, but we never speak. You may think it’s foolish for two men to behave in such a way, but there it is.”

Grace had a great deal of shopping that she had to do for the new baby, and she wanted to do it in the stores where she felt at home. So September 1956, found her back in America again, half proud, half shy at the rapid outcome of the wedding that the world had celebrated with her only five months earlier. As she arrived in New York with Rainier, she was carrying a curiously large, almost square handbag that she had purchased on the journey from Hermes in Paris, and she was photographed holding it strategically in front of her, both shielding and concealing the little protuberance in her tummy. The bag was derived from a piece of luggage once used to carry bridles and riding tack, and it became known henceforward as the “Kelly bag” (current price of an Hermes original in lizard—$7,131.57).

The average American reporter found it difficult to get excessively obsequious toward the girl from Henry Avenue. “Mrs. Rainier’’ was how several questioners addressed her when Grace and her husband went to the White House to pay a courtesy call. But the country was transfixed with her new condition. The visit to America by the prince and princess of the mile-square state of Monaco attracted far more attention than the presidents of Italy and Mexico who had visited Washington in recent months. The life and adventures of Grace had become, in some sense, part of America’s own family life.

“They told me about morning sickness,” Grace told Olga Curtis in a nationally syndicated interview on the subject, “but they didn’t tell me you could be sick all day every day.” It was reported that the princess had already gained twenty-six pounds—”My doctor,” the mother-to-be confessed cheerfully, “says I eat too much.” As for the baby’s name: “we’re looking for names that are just as good in English as French.”

America was as eager to share in the pregnancy of its own princess as it had been in her engagement and marriage, but Grace was mindful of where her new loyalties lay. “Last season the Oceanographic Museum drew over 100,000 more visitors than did the Casino,” she told Hedda Hopper, earnestly rattling off statistics as if she were the principality’s Director of Tourism. “Over 15,000 tourists checked in at hotels in Monaco the first two months after the wedding—3,000 more than last season.”

Rainier and Grace shopped the length of Fifth and Madison avenues for baby clothes and equipment, then did it all over again to pick up trunkfuls of the latest electrical gadgets and labor saving appliances which had not yet reached Europe. They wanted to modernize the palace, and they also had plans to build themselves a retreat away from Monaco up in the hills above La Turbie. They packed up Grace’s Fifth Avenue apartment, getting her antique French furniture crated for a return journey across the Atlantic— and they also spent as much time as they could in imitation of the most successful evening of their wedding week: relaxing in private with Grace’s old friends, eating off plates in their laps, and reminiscing. Rainier was even persuaded to try his hand at charades.

“Please do not use the W.C. while the train is standing in the station,” was the first mime that the prince drew.

“I thought, ‘Oh, no!’” remembers Tom Guinzberg, Rita Gam’s husband. “But Rainier just squatted down and did his stuff like a trooper.”

One late autumn weekend just before Grace and Rainier were due to leave, the group went out to the Long Island home of Marcel Palmaro, Monaco’s Consul in New York. There was a chill in the air. The leaves were on the ground, and as Grace strolled through them, kicking up their dampness, she grew nostalgic.

“Oh, how I love it. . . .” she said. “It’s this time of year, the smell of the leaves and the wet dirt, the colors . . .”

“It reminds me of the start of school,” said Carolyn Scott.

“And of football games and dates with new boys and first kisses,” continued Grace, almost melancholic. The East Coast girl was suddenly homesick for falling leaves and misty evenings. Then she stopped abruptly, changing the subject as she realized she might be betraying the fact that she was not totally enchanted to be returning to Monaco. In April, Grace’s departure on the
Constitution
had been a euphoric leap across the ocean with scarcely a backward glance. Now, little more than six months later, the princess was less starry-eyed about the realities of life in the palace on the rock.

“The poor girl really had a tough year or so of it out there to start with,” remembers Maree Frisby Rambo. “It was astonishing, the number of people who gave her a hard time.”

There was the butler who supervised the wine, the silver and the table settings. He resisted every attempt that Grace made to change even the slightest detail of the existing routines. “We don’t do things that way here,” he would sniff. After weeks of maneuvering and cajoling, Grace would finally manage to get some of the lights switched off in rooms that were not in use, only to find them blazing brightly again a few days later. Grace had been looking forward to working out new flower arrangements that made use of the striking and beautiful blooms in the palace gardens, and she carefully explained her ideas to the servant who was in charge of cut flowers. He listened politely—and went on doing exactly what he had always done.

There were bonuses to living in a fairy-tale castle. The embroidery room was staffed by peasant girls whose full-time job was the stitching of beautiful designs for Grace’s pillows and bed linen, as well as the hand-embroidering of her lingerie. But there were also mysterious corridors and wings that palace custom declared out of bounds, and where, Grace complained to Maree, she could not get anyone to take her.

“Grace told me once how miserable she was in those early months,” remembers Gwen Robyns, the author who became a friend of Grace in the mid 1970s. “She used to sit there with her terrible morning sickness, and the Mistral irritating her sinuses to distraction in this gloomy old palace, longing to get cracking and to bring some sunlight into the dust, but being quite sure that everyone was snickering behind her back at her American ideas and her terrible French.”

The servants would not have been a problem if Grace had felt on surer ground with her husband. “With Rainier,” says Gwen Robyns, “she always felt as if she were walking on eggs.” Grace had had a taste of Rainier’s moodiness during the weeks of their engagement in America, but she had not bargained for quite how imperious the prince’s temper could be. Six months of romantic letter-writing and a few days of Christmas cheer had been an imperfect way to test the true mettle of her mate for life. Grace had accepted Rainier without attempting to explore the darker corners of his spirit, and, once on his home territory, she discovered that her new husband had a fearsome temper. From being sweet as pie at one moment, he could snap unpredictably in a second.

“For God’s sake,” the prince yelled at her on one occasion in front of his secretary when he saw the choice of flowers that Grace had made for the guest suite of a visiting dignitary. “White chrysanthemums are the flowers of the tomb!”

The secretary who witnessed this outburst was Madge Tivey-Faucon, an Australian lady who later provided
France Dimanche
and
Cosmopolitan
magazines with ample details of Rainier’s temper and the effect it had on Grace: “How many times have I seen the princess coming out of her room sniffling, red-eyed,” wrote “Tiv” in 1964. “‘I have a cold,’ she would tell me, to hide her embarrassment. . . . Once she had her hair cut very short against the wishes of the prince. . . . He took one look at his wife, and it must have taken him three seconds to discover what was different. When he found out what it was, he became red in the face, his mouth tightened, and he clenched his fist. The princess stopped in the middle of the room embarrassed. And the prince, with all his force, threw his glass on the floor.”

Rainier’s troubled family background had scarcely equipped him to be a sensitive and caring marriage partner. He found it difficult to give of himself emotionally. He had never been taught how to trust or to share. His explosions were hot and human, at least. It was the silences that were harder for his wife to take, the long hours that her partner spent radiating displeasure. When Rainier was withdrawn and stewing, he was the very opposite of the sensitive and amusing soul who had tripped the light fantastic in his love letters.

If there is anything more perverse and bloody-minded than a longtime bachelor, it is a royal bachelor. Strangers encountered the phenomenon in Rainier’s habit of going to sleep when he was bored. He was famous for it. In the middle of a dinner party, in the royal box at the opera, on a sofa making small talk—the eyes would roll, the head would droop, and His Serene Highness would sign off for half an hour or more, snoring, sometimes, like an old man twice his age. It was not a matter of some mysterious medical affliction, as Monaco gossip maintained. It simply reflected Rainier’s regal disdain and his lack of interest in anyone who could not, jesterlike, keep him perpetually amused.

That was the princely and old-fashioned side to Grace’s partner for life. But inside there was a spirit who was striving to improve— the sardonic and funny man who had wooed and won the famous film star, who was not afraid to squat and strain when his turn came round at charades. At his best, the despot could be open and unpretentious—modern not only in his love of gadgets and jazz records, but in his attempts to be a sensitive human being. If the reasons of state which impelled Rainier to marry Grace had included a vision of how his miniature country might be opened up to the wealth and influence of the new world, the prince’s more personal attraction had been to the warmth with which a democratic and natural American girl might open him up as well.

Nowhere did the sensitive and human Rainier show to better effect than in his preparations to be a father in the final months of 1956. Child-rearing was an area in which the prince had made a conscious decision to do better than his predecessors. The animals in his zoo had been the only previous outlet for his parental instincts. The prince cared for them personally when they were sick, bringing baby chimps and tiger cubs up to the palace so that he could nurse them himself.

Now Rainier worked with Grace on the preparations for their own first arrival. The shipping waybill showed that the couple’s loot from their New York shopping spree weighed no less than two tons, and they set out the nursery items—toys, a wicker crib, and white lacquered furniture—in a room adjoining their private apartment in the palace. George Stacey, the decorator of Grace’s Fifth Avenue apartment, happened to be working in France that autumn, and he came down to help them. “He’s designed a really ingenious cabinet and shelving arrangement for the baby’s linen!” Grace wrote home excitedly, revealing that the color scheme for the baby’s room would be in her favorite yellow.

The original plan had been for the baby to be delivered in a small clinic in town. But Grace had been jostled on one of her excursions from the palace. A strange woman had pushed through the crowd, placing her open hand on Grace’s belly and rubbing the spot to wish the princess good luck. At the time Grace had laughed, but mulling it over later, the incident made her uneasy. What if the woman had not been well-intentioned?

Grace discussed her anxieties with her husband, and Rainier agreed. The library in their private apartments was converted into a delivery room, and it was announced that the baby would be delivered in the palace. This came as a considerable disappointment to the reporters who had already started to gather. One group of photographers had bribed the ambulance driver to slow down as he passed a prearranged spot, so they could get a picture of the princess in labor.